✍️ New on our blog
Content Refreshing: A Step-by-Step Strategy (Based on Updating 50+ Posts) by Megan Mahoney
According to a data study that Megan did, blog posts that already had 20+ monthly visitors before an update contributed the majority of the total organic traffic increase.
As such, she only recommends prioritizing updates for old content that earned 20+ monthly visitors at peak performance.
How do you refresh your content? Here’s Megan’s process:
- Update outdated information – Is the information you provide up to date with the current trends in your industry? This includes not only quotes and statistics but also examples that you use.
- Add actionable advice/cut irrelevant details – When you’re writing, include the 80/20 action steps your reader needs to know, along with examples (hypothetical or real) to prove your point. But don’t write any more than that.
- Improve the user experience – Add a table of contents (if your post is long), format blog posts properly, and create attractive, branded graphics.
- Fulfill the searcher’s intent – Google your keyword before you start writing to make sure you are using the right blog post structure (how-to, listicle, etc.). Then ask yourself if each section within the post is relevant to the searcher’s pain points. Finally, ask yourself if the writing is at the searcher’s knowledge level.
- Make final optimizations – Once you’ve updated your post, the last few optimizations include improving your title tag and meta description to drive more clicks, adding a few relevant internal links to the post, and building some external links to the post.
—
How to Calculate Churn Rate + 9 Ways to Decrease It by Michal Pecánek
Churn rate is a proportion of customers who stop paying for a product or service during a given time period. There are two types of churn rate, and here’s how you calculate them:
- Customer churn rate = (customers lost during period/customers at start of period) x 100
- Revenue churn rate = (revenue lost during period/revenue at start of period) x 100
Sidenote for revenue churn rate: You should only take into account the revenue generated or lost from the customers you had at the start of the period.
To find a good churn rate for your business, make a list of your competitors and Google their names in combination with “churn rate” or “retention rate” (the inverse metric). Keep in mind that you and your competitors likely target different segments of the market, and that has a huge impact on churn rates.
With that in mind, here are a few ways to reduce your churn rate:
- Collect feedback from churned customers – Systematically collect the feedback to get a solid sample. Then decide if taking action on their objections and problems makes sense for your product roadmap and marketing strategy.
- Fix your positioning – Churns often happen when you overpromise and underdeliver. Good positioning helps fix the first.
- Make sure you target the right audience – You can decrease your churn rates if you get more qualified visitors to your website.
- Better sales and customer service experience
- Offer a trial or freemium version of your product – The objective of a trial or freemium is to meet or even exceed a prospect’s product expectations. Making your prospects confident in their decisions when they’re about to make the conversion pays off in the context of higher LTV and lower churn.
- Improve onboarding experience – The best way to keep a customer is to show them how they can squeeze the most out of your product as soon as possible.
- Provide great product education resources – You can never over-educate your audience about your product. The more complex your product is, the more you should prioritize education in your marketing communication.
- Keep on improving your product
- Track and improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) – NPS represents customer satisfaction and loyalty based on how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others.
—
14 SEO Tips for More Traffic in 2022 by Joshua Hardwick
Here are the tips:
- Stop focusing on things that don’t matter – There is a lot of noise in the world of SEO. Things like LSI keywords don’t exist and don’t matter. Dedicate your attention and resources to those that do.
- Keep search intent top of mind, always
- Craft compelling title tags
- Refresh declining content – Rankings rarely last forever, so you need to keep a lookout for pages that are declining. We have a post on content refreshing in this newsletter, so make sure you check it out.
- Boost important pages with internal links
- Improve page experience signals
- Double-dip on mixed intent keywords
- Include FAQ sections – When researching a topic, you’ll often come across many related questions people are searching for. One way to address these is to answer any relevant, unanswered questions in an FAQ section at the end of your post.
- Include expert quotes
- Optimize for low-hanging featured snippets
- Upgrade image backlinks – If you have custom illustrations or infographics on your site, others may embed them in their content. These people usually link back to the image source when doing so, but not always. Sometimes, they’ll link to the image file itself. So it’s probably worth reaching out to the post author and asking them to swap out the link.
- Fix dead pages with backlinks
- Run an annual content audit – Read one of our latest posts (also in this newsletter) on how to run a content audit.
- Build more backlinks
—
All You Need to Know About Online Advertising (Done Simply) by Michal Pecánek
You can’t just blindly throw money into Google Ads and expect to take over the market. Regardless of your skill level, your results will be vastly diminished if you’re not guided by a proper marketing strategy.
Online advertising represents just a piece of the promotion part in the famous four Ps of marketing, which form your marketing tactics.
Before you get started with online advertising, make sure:
—
How to Do a Content Audit in 2022 by Joshua Hardwick
Not everything you publish will be a home run. Sometimes, it’ll fail to rank on Google, or convert, or contribute to your business goals in any meaningful way.
When this happens, you shouldn’t just leave the page to die a slow, painful death. You should revisit it, figure out what went wrong, and take action to improve its performance.
To run a content audit, follow this process. This process is based closely on the way our free SEO WordPress plugin works, which pretty much automates the entire content audit process and kicks back recommendations.
If you’re looking for a more robust, SEO-first content audit that also takes things like conversions into account, then follow this process.
—
React SEO: Best Practices to Make It SEO-Friendly by Sam Underwood
React is an open-source JavaScript library developed by Meta (formerly Facebook) for building web and mobile applications. It is becoming the de facto choice for larger businesses that require complex development where a more simplistic approach (like using a WordPress theme) won’t satisfy the requirements.
Historically, issues with React and other JS libraries have been due to Google not handling the rendering step well. Thankfully, Google has resolved most of these issues. Googlebot is now evergreen, meaning it always supports the latest features of Chromium.
But there are still some common SEO issues with React. Here’s what to consider:
- Pick the right rendering strategy – Sam recommends using a React framework called Next.js and using its SSG and SSR options.
- Use status codes correctly – A common issue with most single-page applications (SPAs) is they don’t report status codes correctly. This is as the server isn’t loading the page—the browser is. If you’re client-side rendering, there are a few options like using the React Router framework. If you’re using SSR, Next.js makes this simple with response helpers, which let you set whatever status code you want.
- Avoid hashed URLs – Generally, Google isn’t going to see anything after the hash.
- Use <a href> links where relevant – A common mistake with SPAs is using a <div> or a <button> to change the URL. If the <a href> element is missing, Google won’t crawl the URL and pass PageRank.
- Avoid lazy loading essential HTML –– Spotting such issues isn’t easy, and no tool exists (currently) that’ll tell you directly about them. You can check for common elements such as accordions, modals, tabs, mega menus, and hamburger menus.
- Don’t forget the fundamentals – Your React application still needs to follow best practices for canonicalization, structured data, XML sitemaps, mobile-first, website structure, HTTPS, title tags, and semantic HTML.
—
A Complete B2B SEO Strategy Guide for 2022 by Bill Widmer
Here’s a simple three-step B2B SEO strategy:
- Find keywords your target customers are searching for
- Plan, create, and optimize content for those keywords
- Get backlinks to pages
—
Here’s Why You Should Prioritize Internal Linking in 2022 by Jamie Grant
Here are six tips on how you can implement internal links effectively:
- Link within the main content where relevant
- Include important links within the site navigation
- Utilize breadcrumbs logically – Don’t forget to also implement breadcrumb Schema to ensure Google fully understands your breadcrumbs and that you’re eligible for rich results.
- Internally link to your most valuable content
- Utilize contextually relevant anchor texts to establish topical relevance – You can find contextual internal linking opportunities that already exist on your site for free using Ahrefs Webmaster Tools.
- Regularly audit internal links for errors
|
|
Till next time. ;)
Cheers,
Si Quan
Content Marketing @ Ahrefs
P.S. We’re experimenting with adding more content to our newsletter. What do you think? What should we improve? What should we add? Let me know by replying to this email.
|
|
|
|